October 29, 2020
VAN 8MM
“sentenced the petitioner to a life term, but how long is a life?”
Sci Phi Journal is an online magazine that "wishes to provide a platform for idea-driven fiction, as opposed to the ‘character-driven’ mode that has come to predominate speculative fiction." A few short stories they've published: "Minutes of the Meeting of the Board of Directors of CYBIMPLANT INC held at 10:00 AM on 14 May 2036" by Rick Novy (October 2020), the futuristic legal what-if "Habeas Corpus Callosum" by Jay WerkHeiser (January 2017; content note for rape), a fictional FIFA ruling in "Red Card" by Madeline Barnicle (June 2020), and an academic investigation of the missing Pope "John XX" by Timons Esaias (March 2020).
Nope, they’re just making shit up to justify why those races were close.
Tired of reading wonky, bland polling analysis? The angry Canadians from Lean Tossup are the cure for what ails you. [more inside]
Opium and Bengali comfort food
India saw recreational use of opium during the Mughal era, as well as the ruthless British determination to push the addictive drug into China by military force, with devastating effects on the Chinese (as well as Indians). But inventive Bengali women turned poppy seeds - a byproduct of the opium industry - into the delicious and iconic comfort food base পোস্ত (posto). Here's a beatifully videographed recipe from the good folks at Bong Eats showing how to make the classic Bengali dish of alu posto (potatoes in poppyseed sauce) at home.
"I wanted to introduce the real Chinese food to America."
Cecilia Chiang, Who Revolutionized American Chinese Food, Dies At 100
The chef and restaurant owner who helped change the way Americans think about Chinese food has died. Cecilia Chiang was twice a refugee before she opened the influential San Francisco restaurant The Mandarin and taught Chinese cooking to Julia Child and James Beard. Chiang died Wednesday in San Francisco. She was 100 years old.[more inside]
Oops, sorry guys, my bad!
Kavanaugh corrects a concurring opinion after Vermont secretary of state Condos issued a strong condemnation.
Glenn Greenwald resigns from The Intercept
Glenn Greenwald on Thursday announced that he had resigned from The Intercept—the digital outlet he founded in 2013 with fellow journalists Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill, and with funding from First Look Media—claiming “repression, censorship and ideological homogeneity” at the publication. (The Daily Beast no-paywall link. more here.)
"It shall bee published that hee is a man and a woeman”
For Intersex Awareness Day, Colonial Williamsburg shares the story of Thomas or Thomasine Hall, an early Virginian settler who was brought to trial for refusing to identify as a man or a woman.
For Truly Exquisite Snorting
Lethal in Disguise
As a member of Physicians for Human Rights, Rohini Haar (MD, MPH) has used her medical background to document human rights abuses among the Rohingya in Myanmar and to bring attention to health consequences of crowd-control weapons abroad. She is now leveraging social media to document the use of kinetic impact projectiles (“rubber bullets”) in Black Lives Matter protests in the US. Warning: violent imagery [more inside]
Cape Town's garden of good and evil
"I still love this place as is, because I saw this place grow from not having a [garden] centre, not having a conservatory, and a protea garden and so on ... So I saw this garden grow, but I didn't really grow with it. White people, they took ownership of it, and we didn't [do] that as yet. And there's a difference, because once you take ownership of anything, something changes: 'No, this is ours. We should look after it better.' And no one really explains that to you." [more inside]
"You're always building models. Stone circles. Cathedrals. Pipe-organs."
The 11 greatest vacuum tubes you've never heard of.
Carter M. Armstrong in IEEE Spectrum lays down the law on the vacuum tubes that receive too little honour. [more inside]
Carter M. Armstrong in IEEE Spectrum lays down the law on the vacuum tubes that receive too little honour. [more inside]
"It didn't die. They killed it."
The Death of Sierra On-Line a longread from Vice Gaming
Even professional screenwriters think the 2020 writers are over the top
2020 reads like a TV script. So we asked screenwriters how it should end.
If 2020 were a TV show, the first draft would be terrible. The premise is promising — what happens when political dysfunction meets a deadly virus? — but the execution needs work. Think about how messy it all has been: competing plotlines, too-abrupt soap opera twists, one-dimensional villains, stories introduced and then just as quickly dropped. Like it or not, we’re barreling toward the finale, and no one knows what’s going to happen in the last episode. Will there be a satisfying ending? Or one of those unsettling, ambiguous ones that gnaws at you long after you’ve finished the show? Will it be an ending at all?[more inside]
EHRC Releases UK Labour Antisemitism Report
But the food, it occurred to me, wasn’t what I was after at all
"When my wife and I had COVID-19, we lost our sense of smell and taste for a bit. It was, as my wife put it, 'a joyless existence.' Now I had my taste back, but somehow the joy of eating was still gone."
Human* Rights
"Some staff at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights were told not to talk about pregnancy or abortion, in addition to censoring LGBT content, during some tours involving religious schools. ... A current museum staffer says her supervisor told her to avoid 'women's content like abortion' while giving a tour to a religious school group. She says she was sometimes asked not to mention anything related to the empowerment of women, like the story of Black human rights pioneer Viola Desmond."
You can play as anyone you want, but the game remains the same
Austin Walker comes out of review retirement to argue Watch Dogs: Legion Promises Revolution, But Mostly Delivers Distraction (Vice). “How does one break a neighborhood free from “oppression”? Deface a few billboards. Sabotage a weapons factory. Knock out a really bad person. Complete three tasks like these in a district and you’ll unlock a special liberation mission, which are empty-calorie fun that somehow result in city-wide fireworks and celebration claiming that the neighborhood is now “defiant,” despite the fact that nothing has changed.” Polygon’s more positive review.
So with Groups gone, what does Yahoo even do anymore?
Good question. While the ascendant Yahoo of the 1990s now only lives in our memories, its name and branding continue to shamble on zombie-like to its owner Verizon’s other products — this time, a purple 'Yahoo! Mobile' branded phone which retails for $49.99. [more inside]
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